


Our Blood in the Machinery

by callowyn



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Bottom Raleigh Becket, Canon Compliant, Consensual Possession, Curtain Fic, Dom/sub Undertones, Domestic Fluff, Drift Hangover, Ghost Drifting, M/M, Masturbation in Shower, Multi, Polyamory Negotiations, Resurrection, Self-cest, Sharing a Body, Sibling Incest, Threesome - F/M/M, Yancy Becket Lives
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-14
Updated: 2014-02-14
Packaged: 2018-01-12 10:55:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,212
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1185409
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/callowyn/pseuds/callowyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The thing is, Raleigh Becket does not remember saving the world.  Seven months ago, he woke up with Mako Mori's arms around him and the echo of a voice in his head saying <em>you're welcome</em>—a voice that sounded an awful lot like Yancy.</p><p>The thing is, the voice isn't going away.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Our Blood in the Machinery

It's an exhausting business, winning. He and Mako get dragged to every city the kaiju ever hit along with quite a few they didn't, the last living members of a race of heroes the media is already turning into gods. "What was it like?" the interviewers ask him without fail. They all know the story. "Down there alone, the last man standing, knowing your time was about to run out?"

He smiles every time and gives the same answer. "I didn't do it alone," he says. He talks about Chuck Hansen and Marshall Pentecost. He talks about the bomb. He talks about Newt, screeching their salvation through the comms, and Herc, who stayed behind and lost everything. He talks about Mako, who’s always there sitting across from him in her red lipstick, and tries not to sound like the besotted fool he is. The interviewers lap it up, sometimes Mako throws in something quietly witty, and they all move on to the next question.

The thing is, Raleigh Becket does not remember saving the world. His last clear memory is of Lady Danger’s override trigger failing, and the certain knowledge that this was it, he’d lost, darkness closing in on his breathless gasps. The parts after that—they can’t be real. They don’t make sense. He hasn’t even shared them with Mako, afraid of scaring her away.

He doesn't tell anyone that no, really, he wasn't alone.

—

  


Raleigh presses the eject button on Mako’s escape pod. Prays, for whatever good it’ll do. His own air is going to run out soon.

“I’m initiating...reactor overrides...”

He feels Mako’s mind leave the Drift.

He’s okay. He’s okay. This isn’t the first time he’s had to pilot a jaeger alone. The neural load burns through his muscles as he fumbles for the controls and now, just like then, his brain starts trying to drift with itself, throwing out a lifeline of memories, grasping for another mind that isn’t going to answer. [ _Yancy! Yancy, wait up!_ ] He needs to [ _cackling as he shoves wetcold snow down your collar_ ] to trigger the [ _fist hitting someone’s face, no one messes with your little brother, no one_ ] the meltdown, he has to [ _Raleigh listen to me_ ] has to set Lady’s heart to bursting—

**MANUAL ACTIVATION REQUIRED.**

“Help,” Raleigh whispers, with the last of the air. “Please.” His eyes slip shut.

[ _He’s sixteen and you shouldn’t. He’s sixteen and scrappier than ever, new scabs on his knuckles before the old ones have time to fall off. You lose count of his bruises. The world is full of monsters and your mom is dying but your brother is going to fight and so you fight alongside him, because where else would you be?_

_He’s sixteen and when go to you pick him up from the party that night he’s not waiting out front like he promised, doesn’t answer his phone when you call. You wade through the crowd inside (so young, they’re all so young) until you see the boys circled on the back porch, hear the chanted goading that means you’ve found him._

_This punkass kid has your brother’s arms behind his back while another one’s about to take a swing. You shove through the spectators and catch his fist on your shoulder, send a punch of your own flying back right at the dude’s ugly face because who does he think he is. You tear your brother out of the other kid’s hold and for a second you feel all the trigger-happy aggression that probably got him into this mess; for a second you too are spoiling for a fight._

_But you’re the grown-up here, and you’re big enough and strong enough that they don’t wanna hit you first, so you drag your kid brother away and you just dare anyone to stop you._

_He’s lit up with this, your brother, so happy with his bruised cheekbones and a split lip. He grins and a drop of blood wells up cherry-red, perfectly round. You tug him down the stairs and he tumbles into your arms._

_“You’re drunk,” you realize, feeling the giggle pass along his ribs as you hold him up._

_“Not driving,” he says. “You’re driving. Big punchy man with a car.”_

_“Idiot,” you tell him, with too much affection. He flops his arms across your shoulders, humming happily. You should let him go but he’d fall and you’re not going to let him fall. Then, sudden jolt of electricity, you feel your brother press his lips against your pulse._

_You shove him away. “Cut it out,” you say and he just smiles, affable and pliant, new blood seeping out to replace the drop that’s burning on your skin like kaiju blue. You carry him to the car, drive him home, make him brush his teeth before bundling him off to bed. His own bed. You leave him there to sleep it off._

_You look at yourself in the mirror. He’s sixteen. There’s a tiny slash of red on your neck._

_You don’t wash it off._ ]

The harness releases. Raleigh’s body crashes from wall to wall as the jaeger tosses and turns, but his stumbling legs stay under him; his own arms catch him before he can fall. His hands reach into the trigger hatch and his voice says, “Manual override initiated.”

Raleigh Becket watches his body move of its own accord, lifting him into the escape pod like an exhausted child at the end of a very long day. Someone is talking to him, but he’s already blacked out.

[ _Hey, kiddo. Miss me?_ ]

—

  


Seven months ago, Raleigh woke up with Mako Mori's arms around him and a nonsense echo in his head saying _you're welcome_. 

They live together now, he and Mako, though not in the way everyone supposes. Raleigh had worried, starting when they got in the choppers but never really stopping, that Mako might retreat into herself and her newly-minted grief; didn't know how he'd bear it if she shut him out. But at Marshall Pentecost's funeral she took his hand and quietly ground his bones together until they were allowed to leave.

Originally the PPDC set them up in separate apartments, on different floors of the same heavily-guarded building, and Raleigh felt the two flights of stairs between them like a pit in his gut. Mako must have felt it too, because she showed up at his door the first night, pillow in hand. Raleigh went to hers the second. For three weeks the two of them migrated back and forth, cross-contaminating the pieces of their lives, until Tendo threw up his hands and found them a house.

It’s quiet, nestled in the suburbs of some town in Idaho that’s full of Seattle transplants. Peaceful. There’s a coffee shop within walking distance. The kitchen is painted yellow, just like the one Raleigh grew up with. Mako has arranged her collection of waving cats in the parlor, and out back she’s planning a garden. It’s a fixer-upper, because the PPDC is not exactly rolling in money, but that just means an endless supply of little handyman projects so variable and insignificant that they are nothing like building a wall. It’s perfect. Raleigh loves it.

It’s also haunted.

—

  


The oddities are so small as to be barely worth mentioning. The sensation that every time he enters a room, someone else has just left it. The odd appearance or disappearance of objects in Raleigh's room. Hearing reverberations of voices that haven’t spoken. It's almost definitely nothing, just the flotsam and jetsam of the Drift that linger in eddied corners of any pilot's subconscious, so Raleigh never mentions the shivers that wrack him for no reason. Sometimes he worries—hopes—that on some level he and Mako left the lights on, and that these strange echoes are from her, but it's not her voice that he thinks he's hearing.

Sometimes Raleigh blinks, and twenty minutes have gone by. Sometimes he wakes up with a pen in his hand and no idea what he was planning to write.

—

  


"—leigh? Raleigh."

Mako has a hand on his shoulder, and looks worried. Raleigh blinks at her.

"Are you all right?" she says. "You were talking, and then it seemed like you went asleep."

"Yeah, I've been tired," Raleigh says, though he doesn't remember what they'd been talking about, nor even that Mako was home yet. Hadn't he decided to take a nap?

“Perhaps you should go back to the doctors,” says Mako, but without much gusto. She knows what they’ll say as well as Raleigh does: post-traumatic stress, side effects of the Drift, the brain’s a fragile organ, nothing we can do. He wakes up more tired than he was when he got into bed. He only knows he still has dreams by the straining in his mind every morning to remember what they were.

“I think I should lie down or something,” he says. But first Mako comes and wraps her arms around him, so he can wait a little longer. When they’re touching each other everything calms down, the ripples smooth out; his jagged edges meet their matching pieces. He wishes he were brave enough to ask her to stay with him every night instead of waiting for one of them to wake from a nightmare. He loves her and he doesn’t want to take anything more than she’s willing to give him but this, just this—

But he can’t stand here like this forever, so he sighs and lets her go, searching for a sweater to replace the warmth of her small body against his chest.

“What were you going to say?” says Mako.

Raleigh emerges from his woolen cocoon and the world seems made anew. “What?”

She tilts her head, blue streaks of hair brushing over her collarbones. “You said ‘Mako, listen to me.’ Listen to what?”

—

  


When the switch finally trips, Raleigh is in public. Of course he is. He’s exhausted from weeks of sleep that doesn’t feel like sleep, and okay maybe also a little tipsy, because anyone would have to be to accept hearty congratulations from the same politicians that cut the jaeger program’s legs out from under them. Raleigh remembers being good at this schmoozing thing, back in the glory days, but now he mostly smiles a lot and speaks very little and stays as close as he can to his copilot. It’s funny, because he can picture Yancy doing the exact same thing to him so vividly that he has to stop himself checking for his brother's reaction every time he makes a joke.

[ _All these years later and you’re still not funny, Rals._ ]

What?

Raleigh blinks and shakes himself and eats another hors d’oeuvre that he washes down with a great deal of champagne. It’s one thing to space out when he’s home with Mako, but he is _not_ going to be the one to change headlines from BECKET  & MORI WIN IT FOR GOOD to RALEIGH BECKET: DAMAGED OR DANGEROUS?

[ _Wait. Can you hear me?_ ]

A senator is trying to get Raleigh’s endorsement for some pet project or another, but Mako must feel his jangling panic from across the room because she glides in to engage the man with so much grace that he appears to forget Raleigh was ever there to begin with. Raleigh touches her wrist in thanks and makes a beeline for the bathroom, which is brightly-lit, decadently tiled, and blessedly empty. He turns the deadbolt lock and stares at himself in the mirror.

He doesn’t _look_ crazy, but then, what exactly is that supposed to look like? The bags under his eyes have been there for months. Thanks to some competent stylists, his hair has never been less wild.

One eye, without his permission, winks.

“Shit,” Raleigh mutters, scrubbing at the muscles before they do it again. He holds his eyelid open and leans in, staring, searching out anything unusual. He wishes his hallucination would stop laughing.

[ _You can hear me!_ ]

“Shut up, no I can’t,” says Raleigh to the mirror. There, now he looks the part of a madman.

[ _Fucking finally. Do you have any idea how frustrating it is to drag your sleepwalking ass downstairs every night just to have you wake up and tuck yourself back in before I can do a damn thing about it?_ ]

This is it. Raleigh Becket has snapped. There’s no way, no possible way, for that voice to be who he thinks it is.

A familiar sigh echoes through his mind. [ _Figure it out, Raleigh._ ] And a memory, one of the last before Knifehead, of waking up with Yancy already kissing his way from mouth to navel on down, wondering how any one person could feel this much happiness without exploding—except then the memory stutter-flips, and he sees himself through Yancy’s eyes, feels his own skin under his brother’s mouth.

[ _Yeah,_ ] says Yancy’s voice in his head. [ _That was a good one._ ]

“Fuck!” Raleigh grinds his palms into his eye sockets until he sees stars and nothing else. “It’s not real,” he whispers, because worse than the thought of some madness taking him hostage is the sudden knowledge that if he’s not careful, he’s going to invite it in.

He splashes some water on his face and steels himself to go back to the party. “You are not real,” he tells his reflection firmly. “My brother is dead. Leave me alone.”

His reflection doesn’t answer.

—

  


He gets through the rest of the night on autopilot—although _whose_ autopilot, he can’t tell; he chooses the jalepeño poppers over another bacon mini-quiche and quietly freaks out in front of the very confused waiter until Mako comes and leads him to the window to calm down. When she asks him what’s wrong, all he can say is “I don’t know” and hope to be allowed to leave soon. Mako purses her lips.

Mako’s pursed lips are no joke. She says a few quiet words to their host, gives another brief instruction to their security detail, and within half an hour Raleigh is being gently escorted back to their chauffeured SUV. She doesn’t make him talk about it, but she does take his hand across the backseat and hold on the whole drive back to their house.

They pull into the driveway. “I think there’s something,” Raleigh begins, but can’t quite bring himself to finish: _something wrong with me._ Mako squeezes his hand and waits. “I’ll tell you once I figure it out,” he promises miserably.

She nods and unlocks the door. “Sooner would be better than later, Mr. Becket.”

For a second he doesn’t know which of them she’s talking to.

—

  


Raleigh Becket, for purely recreational purposes, owns a pair of handcuffs.

Remembering that Yancy—the hallucination that is _not_ Yancy—had said something about sleepwalking, he digs them out of the battered box under his bed and fastens one cuff around the bedpost. The other, he locks around his left wrist.

It still fits perfectly. Settling beneath the covers, he squirms a little and tries not to think about it.

Maybe his body attempts to get up without him while he’s asleep, but all Raleigh knows on waking is that there are pins and needles in his arm and distinct signs of interest coming from his dick. Groggily, he unlocks himself and stumbles into the shower. His non-tingling hand is just settling into a comfortable rhythm when he wakes up a little more and considers the possibility that he’s being watched.

[ _Well, don’t stop on my account._ ]

Raleigh muffles a curse and squeezes the base of his cock. He should have known this was going to happen—those handcuffs are _from_ Yancy, and they haven’t come out of the box since he died. Of course wearing them all night was going to bring the hallucination back.

His boner isn’t going down, though.

[ _Remember the first cuffs I got you? That pink fuzzy pair?_ ]

God, how could he forget? Yancy bought them as a joke at some novelty store in Anchorage proper, sauntering into their bunk with an exaggerated leer and the promise that Raleigh was gonna come with these babies around his wrists or not at all. They’d broken less than 48 hours later.

[ _Yeah, you liked them more than I was expecting._ ]

Raleigh laughs and thunks his forehead against the slippery tile, eyes gone watery. Yancy was always pulling shit like that, surprises that fell somewhere between pranks and declarations of love. Few people suspected the devious mastermind that lurked behind those sleepy-looking blue eyes; exactly one person knew just how sappy a romantic Yancy Becket truly was.

Christ, but some of his ideas had been good ones. Raleigh gives his dick a few strokes without thinking—his hand is already _right there_ —and then stops. Is he seriously going to stand here and jerk off to memories of his dead brother?

[ _Don’t get shy on me now, kiddo._ ]

Apparently yes. He shifts his legs, settling in, and starts moving his hand faster. When he braces his left arm against the shower wall, his sore wrist sends a little zip right down to his groin.

Raleigh groans, biting his lip to stop himself being even louder. He should be thinking of anything else, anyone but Yancy; he spent so long trying not to dwell on these memories but now he gets lost in the barrage of them and it’s like drifting—he can remember being himself dragging Yancy in for a kiss to feel the balls-deep shift of him inside his body, but he also remembers being Yancy and watching his little brother across the mess hall with a sick-happy rush of pride at how gingerly Raleigh took his seat.

The voice in his head croons at him. [ _Yeah, you want something up in you? Come on, touch yourself, put that other hand to good use._ ]

“Fuck,” gasps Raleigh, and he does it, crazy or not, sliding his middle finger back down to the entrance of his hole and crooking it upward. The water running down his face means he has to keep closing his eyes, but that just makes it harder to remember where he is and who he is, remember that this isn’t the Anchorage Shatterdome with his brother hovering close under the spray behind him while no one can see.

[ _That the best you can do?_ ]

Raleigh can practically feel Yancy's breath whispering against his ear, and it's not real but it brings out his younger-brother competitive streak all the same, the familiar bid for Yancy's attention and pride. He works another finger in beside the first, the hand on his dick slacking to an aimless tug now and then while he searches for that angle that'll make his brain dribble out of his ears. " _Ah—_ "

[ _Nailed it._ ]

All Raleigh's held breath comes wooshing out on a laugh. "Jesus christ, Yance," he mutters, mouth falling open when he does it again. He's imagining what he must look like, one hand on his cock and the other one two fingers deep in his ass, and he's not narcissistic enough for all of that lust to be coming from him. Raleigh switches his attention forward once more, thumbing at the precome pulsing out the tip of his dick before the water can wash it away.

[ _God, always love to put on a show, don't you? I bet you get off even harder, thinkin' about me watching you._ ]

"Nnhh," Raleigh agrees, speeding up his strokes. Maybe it's just his imagination, but Yancy's voice sounds rougher around the edges.

[ _Look at you, christ. I could tell you to draw it out but you couldn't, could you? Too desperate for it, touching yourself like this is your last chance._ ]

Raleigh chokes. Yancy doesn't understand that it _is_ his last chance, or might be; this weirdly self-sufficient hallucination might disappear at any time and it's Raleigh that'll get left behind again. He pulls faster, pushes deeper, but that edge he's looking for stays just beyond his reach like the brother he's not getting back.

[ _Hey hey hey hey, Raleigh. Take it easy, bro, we got time._ ]

Raleigh lets out a noise through his teeth, bites down on his lip hard enough to taste copper—if anything the pain makes him harder—sees himself at sixteen, grinning with blood on his lips, sees Yancy in the mirror staring at the blood on his own throat. His grip is punishing now.

[ _Never gonna get anywhere trying to force it like that,_ ] says Yancy. The press of a foreign mind around his is like a tangible thing, and growing stronger. [ _Raleigh, do you want—can I try—_ ]

"Yes," Raleigh chokes out, "god, please, _please_ —"

And then his hands are still moving, but he's not the one controlling them anymore.

“Shit, _fuck,_ ” says Raleigh, and his legs try to give out but something else is holding him up. He doesn’t need to imagine it’s Yancy touching him when the movements of his own body have so clearly changed: long teasing strokes that aren’t quite tight enough, hand dropping from his dick entirely to lavish attention on his balls while the other starts up a familiar rhythm. Then his hand scoops up more precome and uses it as slick along with the water running between his fingers, amplifying the wet slap of skin on skin. In his mind Yancy’s voice whispers a litany of filth and affection as Raleigh’s hips rock in time.

Yancy speeds up, and Raleigh’s muscles start shaking. He still feels every sensation, doubled rather than halved because his brother’s mind is feeding it back to him. Raleigh can hear the faint whimpers mixed in with every harsh breath and can’t be sure who they belong to. He’s close, he’s so close, he just needs—

[ _Come on, Raleigh, I’m right here, lemme see you. Come on. For me._ ]

His fingers press down on his prostate as his other hand gives a little twist that’s pure Yancy, and Raleigh Becket comes all over the floor.

He falls forward against the shower wall, gasping hugely. He hasn’t gotten off like that in months. Maybe years, if he’s being honest. He doesn’t want to examine the wayward synapses where Yancy’s voice was hiding but he can’t help it, his mind prodding at itself like a tongue searching for a lost tooth.

[ _I’m right here, kid. Not going anywhere._ ]

Raleigh turns the water off. Then—made even more humiliating by the lack of any other noise—he starts crying.

[ _Shhh,_ ] Yancy soothes him, [ _shh shh it’s okay. We’re okay._ ] When Raleigh wipes his face and starts trying to towel off, Yancy adds: [ _I know my skills are beast, but this is just embarrassing._ ]

Raleigh chuckles, still rather wetly, but the tears have stopped. “I hate you,” he says.

[ _Nah, you don’t._ ]

Yancy’s in his head. Raleigh doesn’t have to say it.

—

  


One of the more obscure phenomena that the PPDC investigated during the initial jaeger research was called _post-interface neural anomalies,_ colloquially known as _ghosts in the machine_. It wasn’t just pilots that fell into synch with each other after the Drift, though those weird moments of creepy tandem made for the most media attention, the best party tricks. Sometimes, technicians reported, a jaeger’s Pons would click into alignment with its pilots even before the bridge had been fully established. Sometimes the logs detected electrical activity akin to brain waves, even while the helmets sat inert and tucked away, no matter what the programmers did to eradicate the bug. Sometimes, like the body of a restless dreamer, a jaeger moved with no one inside it.

What happens, one researcher wondered, to a piece of machinery so thoroughly imprinted with the workings of human minds? Could the motherboard be retaining those patterns in some sort of probability groove, making them more likely to spontaneously manifest? In a machine sophisticated enough to connect two thought-streams and translate them into motion, would it be possible for a jaeger to remember its pilots?

Most of the literature dismisses this phenomenon. Jaeger tech was hacked together with spit and duct tape, everyone knows that, and so there were bound to be flukes, exaggerated by superstitious pilots who needed something to believe in. Every Shatterdome has its ghost stories.

—

  


It seems easier for Yancy to take over when Raleigh's not all there himself. It happens again, twice: once as Raleigh's dozing on a lazy Sunday morning, and once after Raleigh, sans Mako, makes an ill-advised attempt to rejoin society by way of barhopping. After the pub where every single person tries to shake his hand, and the dance club where some DJ has remixed kaiju screams into the thudding bass, Raleigh finds himself against the wall of a dimly-lit alley already half-lost in the Drift. Yancy proceeds to get him off so persuasively that he’s surprised, on opening his eyes, not to actually see anyone smirking up from between his legs.

But now that Raleigh's paying attention, he catches more of Yancy filtering in when he's not trying: wry mental asides in Yancy's voice, tics and gestures that he recognizes seeing from the outside, flashes of emotion that aren't his own. For the most part Raleigh lets them happen—encourages them, even, by snarking back whenever Mako's out of earshot. After all, he spent most of his childhood trying to be just like his big brother; what's the harm if he comes closer than most?

Then it's Wednesday night, and Mako has just left for Japan, because she's a competent adult doing useful work on the PPDC's cleanup projects. Raleigh is vegged out on the couch after a long day's battle with the dripping faucet in the downstairs bathroom. He slides one hand into his sweatpants, in no real hurry, mind on nothing in particular. It's only when his arm stops moving that Raleigh realizes he was sort of expecting someone else to take over.

"Yance?" he mumbles, heart rate starting to pick up at the thought that _he's gone, that was it, that was all you got_ —but then he feels a flare of guilt that's hidden away again so quickly that he knows it wasn't his. His own relief makes for an odd contrast.

[ _Don't worry about it, Rals._ ]

"What, what's wrong?" Raleigh sits up, remembering in the nick of time to flatten his hair with the hand that wasn't just on his dick. He's met with sullen silence from his brain, and he pulls the face that means _I will pester you forever until you answer me_ , knowing Yancy will recognize it even from inside.

[ _Brat,_ ] says Yancy, and his fondness would almost be enough to make Raleigh drop it except for how badly Yancy wants that to work. After another minute, Raleigh's lungs sigh without him. [ _Look, I just think maybe we should cool it with the—this._ ]

"What? How come?" Raleigh can recite by heart the fight they had in December of 2017, the first and only time Yancy tried to break things off between them. The conversation heavily featured the phrase _taking advantage of you_ , never explicitly included the word _incest_ , and ended with spectacular bloody noses on both sides and nearly a fortnight in separate rooms. It's not an experience he's keen to repeat.

[ _You waited until Mako wasn't here._ ] Phantom sensations: churning gut, sounds of doors slamming, a whiff of Dad's aftershave. [ _That doesn't seem a little sleazy to you?_ ]

"I'm not cheating on her," Raleigh says, offended more deeply than he expected to be. "Dude, you know I would never do that. Mako and I aren't dating."

[ _Yeah, but you want to be._ ] No argument from Raleigh—he's been laughably obvious even to someone not stuck in perma-drift with him—but Yancy continues anyway. [ _You don't just want to date Mako Mori, little brother. You want to marry her. You're building her a goddamn house._ ]

"I'm not _building a house,_ " Raleigh says, because painting a few rooms and fixing the faucets and installing a nicer shower and having definite plans to re-tile the roof next summer is not _building a house._ Yancy doesn't even have to raise their shared eyebrow to express how he feels about that one.

[ _Bro, if you had more artistic ability, you'd be building her a shrine._ ] Yancy sounds amused, but when he's focused on sending Raleigh words it gets harder to catch the underlying emotions. [ _You think Mako is the best thing ever produced by the human race. She's strong, she's smart, she's fearless, and she gets shit done. Even after all she's been through, she's ready to put the whole world back together with her bare hands. Getting her to laugh feels like winning a gold medal, and if you had the option, you'd eat her out for every breakfast, lunch and dinner._ ]

Well. Putting aside that mental image for another time, Raleigh frowns, wishing he could see his brother's face. "Yancy," he says after a long pause. "Are you jealous?"

[ _Look, I'm just saying, between the girl who helped you save the world and your own semi-dead brother, it's pretty obvious who you're supposed to end up with._ ]

"But," Raleigh says. Five years, four months, plus all the time it's taken him afterwards to realize what his mind had salvaged from the Drift—isn't that long enough to wish he had his brother back?

But now doubt is crawling in, the worries he’s tried so hard not to name for fear of being overheard. He spent so long alone on the towering Wall, trapped in the past; what if hearing Yancy’s voice is just a sign that he’s losing himself again? How can he cling to a ghost and still have a future?

In the conn-pod, before Pitfall, he'd told Mako he could see a future with her, and he meant it. Even now Raleigh can't imagine a life without Mako in it. He has _plans_. He wants to learn how to properly cook real bacon so he can bring Mako breakfast in bed. He wants to spend baseball season listening to Mako trash-talk the Mariners while the two of them play footsie in their pajamas. He wants to rake a leaf pile in the backyard and toss Mako into it—or, in trying, end up face down in the pile himself. He wants to dance around the kitchen to Shibuya Pop. He wants to take Mako ice fishing and sit next to her for hours without saying a word. He wants to be the one beaming in the front row when Mako, iron and unshakeable, stands up to make the world listen, because saving the planet once isn't enough for her. He wants to spar with Mako without the hanbo this time, wants her to knock him on his back and pin him down with her thighs around his waist and—

[ _Okay, cowboy, cool your jets,_ ] Yancy interrupts. Raleigh flushes, moving a pillow into his lap as though Yancy can't feel it. Yancy started this, he's the one planting images in—

Then he blinks, running through those fantasies one more time.

"I hate ice fishing," says Raleigh slowly.

Yancy snorts, which shouldn't even be possible from someone without a nose. [ _That's cause you're like a puppy that hasn't been housebroken, you can't sit still long enough to—_ ]

"Yancy, _you_ like ice fishing."

Long, damning silence. The pieces click into place.

"And throwing people in leaf piles is something you used to do to _me._ Those bright ideas weren't just mine. You want to be with Mako too." Raleigh stands up. "Yancy. You're in love with her."

[ _Oh for—I am not,_ ] says Yancy, but he's definitely lying, Raleigh can tell. Unbidden, he pictures Naomi Sokolov as he last saw her: in the Drift, through Yancy's eyes, just before the screeching chaos of their minds falling out of sync.

Yancy's guilt is like a kick in the chest. [ _I'm not gonna do that. I won't get in your way, I swear._ ]

"You're in my head," Raleigh snaps. “How exactly are you planning to stay out of it?”

[ _You pushed me out before. Just do it again._ ]

“ _No._ ” Raleigh’s on his feet, but there’s no one to growl at, no one’s face to get up into. He stalks across the carpet and back, cracking his knuckles, as Knifehead roars in his mind. “I don’t want you out of it. I don’t want you to go away, Yance, I don’t care if I’m crazy, and if that means—”

He stops, and pinches the bridge of his nose. If that means what? Is he willing to give up this miraculous reincarnation of his brother for the chance to be with Mako? Or is he going to spend an eternity in this undefined limbo he and Mako have fallen into, never knowing if they could’ve been more, for the sake of keeping Yancy?

“Fuck this,” Raleigh announces. “I’m not making that call, not til I’m out of options.” Fleetingly, he remembers the fight they’d had after Naomi, when Yancy told him to grow some balls. The irony makes him smile, shaky with ungrounded energy.

[ _What are you going to do,_ ] says Yancy, in that resigned way that means he’s already considered and given up on talking Raleigh out of it.

“I’m telling her,” says Raleigh. “I’m gonna tell Mako everything.”

—

  


He waits until a few days after she gets back from her trip to Japan, gives her plenty of time to settle back into their domestic routines. Mid-afternoon on Monday, after several deep, calming breaths, Raleigh fixes some tea the way he knows she likes it and presents it to Mako where she’s curled up reading in the sunny spot on the couch.

"I’m gonna tell you something that I think might freak you out a little," Raleigh begins.

Mako raises her eyebrows, silently accepting the tea. Her expression suggests that if he believes what he has to say is somehow more alarming than slicing the wings off a kaiju in space, then he is welcome to try.

He's not sure if that's encouraging or not.

"So I've been acting sort of weird lately, right?" he says. "With the, the sleepwalking, and the zoning out, and—" What else has Yancy gotten up to? He doesn’t even know. Raleigh wants to ask him, but it's a little early in the conversation to start talking to thin air and the voice in his head is unusually quiet. "Anyway, I think I figured out why, but it sounds really messed up so hear me out on this, okay?"

Mako sets down her teacup. "Are you all right?"

Raleigh laughs, sort of, then winces. "It's, ah. It's Yancy."

To his confusion, Mako's face goes soft, and she looks down. "I am sorry, Raleigh," she says. "I had wondered if it might be something like that."

A pause. Raleigh says, "What?"

“I left you alone in the Breach,” Mako says. “Having to pilot Lady alone a second time—it's not surprising you've started having nightmares about him again.”

"No, that's not—" He wants to correct her, but even without being plugged into her emotions, Raleigh's first instinct is to get rid of that self-recrimination in her voice. "Mako. Hey, you didn't leave me anywhere, all right? I got you out so you'd be safe. You making it out alive, that's about the best thing I was hoping for. I didn't even think I'd get to see you again, having you here is like the beyond best case scenario." He clears his throat. "But, uh, that's not what I was gonna say. Well, actually, I guess that's a good enough place to start. I mean, that was the first time, was in the Breach."

She frowns. "Sorry?"

Raleigh rubs the side of his head. "I felt Yancy, down there," he confesses. "My air was going, and that neural load was burning me up and I thought I was gonna die, I didn’t think I was gonna be able to do it. But then something made my body get up and keep going.”

"Lady," Mako whispers, seemingly to herself. He’s not at all surprised to learn she’s one of the pilots to believe jaegers have minds of their own. If not for the past couple weeks, Raleigh’d be inclined to agree with her.

"It was Yancy," he says. "And I mean, the Drift always sort of feels like Yancy, but I’d figured that was just me. This was something different. He actually moved _for_ me." Raleigh flexes his hands. “I was piloting the jaeger, and my brother was piloting me.”

Mako looks up. "I've felt him too," she begins, but Raleigh shakes his head.

"Look, this gets weirder." He starts pacing, with the same restless energy from the other night. "The sleepwalking, everything that's been going on with me, it's because—because he didn't leave."

Whatever she'd been about to say before, Mako frowns and asks only, "How?"

“I don’t know! It’s like I _downloaded_ him or something.” He runs his hands through his hair. “Either I’ve gone off the deep end or he’s—he’s back. Yancy is back.” It’s the first time he’s said so out loud. Raleigh says it again, testing how true the words feel, needing Mako to believe him so he can trust his own blind faith. “I’ve got Yancy back.”

After a moment, Mako picks up her tea. “So I guess it’s true what they say.” She smiles. “You really can find them again in the Drift.”

But Raleigh’s not her copilot for nothing; that’s not a happy smile. It takes a minute but then the memory hits: Pentecost’s voice over the comms, making a promise, and the waves of anguished love from Mako as the bomb went off.

“Oh, Mako,” he murmurs, dropping down on the couch next to her. Yancy was connected to Raleigh when he died, and to Lady Danger, both of whom lived to tell about it; jaeger tech is just complicated and mysterious enough that there’s room for reasonable doubt. The Marshall, Chuck, and Striker Eureka are all lost to the Pacific. He rubs circles on her back and wishes he hadn’t said anything.

“It’s all right.” She squares her shoulders and gives him a more genuine smile. “I’m happy for you, Raleigh, really. Is he with you all the time? Have you two picked up where you left off?”

There’s a pause while Raleigh tries to figure out what she’s talking about, because it can’t possibly be what it sounds like. “What do you mean?”

“It’s okay, Raleigh,” she says gently. “I saw.”

“Saw,” he repeats.

She nods. “You and Yancy. In the Drift, I saw your memories. You’re in love with him.”

Raleigh freezes. He’d seen the incestuous gay sex montage go by when they were first linking up, of course he had, but Mako never said anything about it so he’d hoped her own RABIT had distracted her enough to forget about it. The next time they drifted, he’d been too distracted with thoughts of his new copilot to dwell on the old; he figured later he’d gotten off scot-free. Has she known this entire time?

He takes his hand off her back. The silence has dragged on far too long for plausible deniability, and in any case, it’s Mako; Raleigh owes her better than that. “I didn’t know you knew,” he says hoarsely. “Did you think—were you—” He doesn’t know the best way to phrase _how disgusted are you with me right now._

She takes a long sip of tea, considering. “I was mostly surprised, at first,” she admits. “I had read about the possible side effects of drifting, but you and Yancy were a little bit different, weren’t you? I wasn’t expecting there to be so, so much. Of that.” She bites her lip, white on blood-red.

Raleigh feels like he’s going to choke—worse, because the part of him that’s not him can remember what it’s like to actually drown. She’s not saying it but she must be thinking it, it’s crossed his own mind often enough: what kind of sick person falls in love with their brother _before_ the Drift?

“I’m sorry,” he says numbly. “I’m so so sorry—Mako—I never wanted to make you uncomfortable, if you want, if you want me to leave, I can—god—” He starts to lurch to his feet, ready to start packing immediately if that’s what it takes. To his shock, he feels her hand on his arm, stopping him.

“Stay,” says Mako.

Raleigh sinks to his knees in front of her, and Mako leans forward so her arms circle his shoulders and his chin is resting on her shoulder. He clings to her like she’s pulling him out of the ocean because hey, she did it before. “Please don’t hate me,” he mumbles into her cardigan.

“I do not hate you,” Mako says. “I was surprised when I saw, and then I thought about it some more, and I realized: it didn’t _feel_ wrong. It was incest, yes—” Raleigh flinches— “but what you were doing, it didn’t feel _sick_. Do you understand? You were happy to be with him. I believe those are some of your happiest memories. He treasured you.”

He clutches her tighter. Overwhelming relief fills his body. [ _Holy shit,_ ] says Yancy. [ _You did it. You found The One._ ]

Raleigh laughs, but Yancy’s not joking. The fact of their relationship had always been so much more of a burden to his older brother, even once they’d both stopped fighting it; for Yancy the guilt never really faded. To find someone who knows about them, and yet doesn’t hate Yancy for it, is something even a Drift-salvaged Lazarus like himself can’t believe is real.

Mako hears Raleigh’s laughter and draws back, confused but smiling. “Yancy,” Raleigh explains, because doesn’t that just sum it up? Mako’s hands are still on his shoulders, holding him down, but he’s never felt lighter.

“He’s here right now?” she asks. “Can he hear us?”

“Uh, yeah, I guess.”

[ _Swear to god, Rals, if you don’t propose to her I’m gonna. You’re already on your knees and everything._ ]

Raleigh just shakes his head and grins at her. “He says thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” says Mako. Then she shifts closer; there’s a brief thought, which he’s pretty sure belongs to Yancy, that she’s about to kiss him. Instead Mako takes him by the chin and stares into his eyes like she’s trying to see what lurks behind them.

“Yancy Becket,” she says, her sharp fingers on Raleigh’s face. “May I speak with you?”

And then the strangest sensation passes through Raleigh’s body, more intense now because he’s not distracted by sex, like he’s being submerged in cool water. It’s exactly and yet nothing like entering the Drift.

Faint and muffled, he hears his own voice, feels his own mouth moving.

“Miss Mori,” Yancy says. “It’s an honor.”

—

  


Someone is saying his name.

“Huh?” Raleigh rubs his eyes and there Mako is, just like he left her, but the setting sun means he’s been out for at least a couple hours. His throat feels sore, but he can’t remember any of the words that came out of it. “What’d I miss?”

Mako’s innocent shrug comes with a decidedly wicked gleam in her eye. “Oh, this and that,” she replies, and that’s all she’ll say on the matter.

Later, Yancy does apologize for shoving Raleigh so far under, though he points out that that’s what Raleigh was unconsciously doing to him during the first several months of bodysnatching.

“What were you guys talking about for so long?” Raleigh asks, trying to determine how suspicious he should be. He’s fairly convinced that they don’t both hate him, but on the other hand Yancy is definitely not above starting prank wars by proxy.

[ _She’s a pistol, isn’t she?_ ] is Yancy’s cryptic response.

“More like a plasma cannon,” Raleigh says, but from then on whenever Raleigh prods him on the subject, Yancy answers with a smug silence that does not bode well. Raleigh takes to checking all doors before he walks through them in case there’s a bucket waiting for him. He fervently hopes he isn’t going to be a surprise participant in his own body’s wedding.

Then the package arrives.

—

  


If Raleigh paid more attention to Tendo’s Shatterdome gossip, or even read newspapers more often, he might have heard about Newt Geiszler’s full-body leap into the world of entrepreneurship. The product: personal Drift tech, available commercially to create a neural bridge between any two consenting human adults. (The fact that “human” needed specifying apparently causes Hermann daily ulcers.) The Geiszler Array is still in prototype, but initial test trials have been very positive, and now there is one sitting on Raleigh’s doorstep.

[ _Finally._ ]

Raleigh stands well out of the way while Mako sets up the machine, which looks nothing at all like the full-body jaeger suits he’s used to, but there are clearly two hats and when the computer screen boots up he sees the familiar startup screen for entering the Drift.

“Missed you too, Mako,” he says under his breath, and he’s not really joking.

Mako grins, holding out one of the helmets. “Mr. Geiszler assures me that the only potential harm in drifting without a jaeger is the occasional urge to punch things,” she says. “As his test partner was Mr. Gottlieb, however, that problem may not be universal.”

Raleigh smiles back so hard it hurts. “What’s this about?” he asks, taking the helmet, but he doesn’t even care; two minds full and his head still doesn’t feel complete without her.

“This seemed the best way for me to talk to both of you at once,” says Mako lightly. She places the helmet atop her perfectly smooth hair. “Your brother was very insistent.”

[ _Surprise,_ ] adds Yancy, and if he thinks he is concealing that giddy excitement he is sorely mistaken. Raleigh shakes his head and fits the nodules over his spiked hair.

“Let’s do this,” he says.

They drift.

—

  


[ _You are Mako-Raleigh-Yancy you are alight waiting you are a second chance written in triplicate and you are found you are you are—_

_You are Raleigh Becket, and the first time you kiss your brother is against the door of your shared bunk before either of you has fully come down from your first Drift. Frankly you are lucky to have made it as far as your room. You kiss him, and he kisses you back, and you want to shake him for the years of accumulated moments when you told yourself no, never, he wouldn’t—but Yancy knows, because he saw them, and because he had just as many memories of his own waiting for you to unearth. You kiss him until he stops feeling guilty and push until all you have left is this._

_You are Yancy Becket, and you are trying to tell your brother something important, but you are interrupted._

_You are Mako Mori and you’ve been given a jaeger, though not the way you wanted; her name is Lady Danger and she only barely clung to her limbs as the surviving half of the Becket boys dragged her to shore. You share the Marshall’s disdain for them, the big damn heroes who rescued a boat but lost the battle, nearly lost this beautiful machine that’s become one of a dying breed. But you are good at fixing broken things._

_You are Raleigh Becket, building walls._

_You are Mako and an engineer, not a pilot, so you’re usually alone inside Lady but today you’re giving her a new heart and you don’t feel alone. It’s not that someone is watching you, not Tendo checking your work and not, thank god, Chuck with the permanent apologetic scowl he’s worn since he inherited Striker Eureka and you stopped speaking to him. No, this is not a living person, but you believe it may be a person all the same. You learned very early that the best way to keep your ghosts is to let their shadows stay hidden in the corners of your eyes, but softly, so as not to disturb it, you begin singing in the language you have come to associate with the dead._

_Nameless, unsure what you are, you sing back._

_You are six years old and your big brother is running too fast, you can’t catch up with him, your entire body is aching with how hard you try to reach him, but no matter how many times you shout his name through the freezing wind he won’t answer you. You collapse in the snow._

_When you were human, and alive, your name was Yancy Becket, but you are no longer either of these things. Now your body is iron and heat and danger and your thoughts run through circuit boards that should not be awake. You are titanic, a monster to fight monsters, so much larger than the fragile body clambering through your raw wires, but her voice carries. You listen._

_You are Mako Mori, swordmaker’s daughter, and you are making a sword._

_Better, or worse?_

_When you fight, you can feel her watching you. Patience has never been your strong suit and so you call her out, lift your chin in challenge, and you feel the returning spark when she purses her lips, gives her cool judgment and finds you wanting. So test me, you want to say to her, push me, make me prove it to you. She steps into the kwoon and your body lights up and then you are on your back, breathing too hard, and you don’t even have to remind yourself who put you there. You never expected to feel this awake again. You have a copilot._

_You feel foolish, but the first person you want to tell is your jaeger and so you do, sneaking in after hours to whisper in rapid Japanese that the partner he found is you, you are going to be a pilot, you will finally get to stand in this spot and feel the machine moving with you, the pieces you so carefully stitched back together will be in your hands and Lady Danger will you dance with me?_

_She asks you what you remember about Raleigh Becket, whether he always smiles like that when he loses, if he takes proper care of you aside from that last time. Asks if you’ve missed him, and something deep in your processors wakes up. You remember Raleigh. They’re your copilots, Mako tells you, she and Raleigh are going to steer you into battle, and you can’t decide if that sounds inside-out or just right. When she leaves she presses her lips against the cold cockpit wall, a split-second kiss, and you feel it to your core._

_Together, you’re going to save the world._ ]

—

  


And then the present reasserts itself, two pairs of eyes refocusing on each other above identical grins. The helmets seem almost superfluous.

“So,” says Mako, giggling aloud at their threefold joy. She missed Raleigh’s mind in hers, of course, but she has also missed her ghost. To Yancy she asks, “What was it you were so sure I needed to see rather than be told?”

He winks at her, and then she is awash in a blur of so many memories that only the emotions come through clearly: the feeling of rust polished bright anew, of dormant things waking up, of carrying a weight for so long that you don’t know what to do when someone offers to lighten the load. Soul-deep recognition of the spaces left by lost things and a fierce pride that keeps walking anyway. The feeling of Mako Mori’s hands putting you back together.

“He’s in love with you, you know.”

Even if they weren’t connected, something in his voice makes her sure she could still tell it was Yancy. She closes her eyes and reaches into the Drift, where her mind’s eye can see Raleigh’s familiar grin side by side with its slightly older counterpart, the face she recognizes from photographs and memories.

[ _It’s not just me,_ ] Raleigh says, and Mako can feel the truth in that: not just for saving his brother, but because Yancy recognizes in her a kindred spirit; he knows how hard it is to build a family when the one you had falls apart.

Yancy holds his hands up and counters, [ _Ignore him. I’m not gonna get in your way._ ]

[ _Don’t be stupid, Yance, this isn’t gonna work with just two of us._ ]

[ _I’m not stupid, you’re stupid._ ] If he had his own arms, he’d be giving Raleigh a noogie right about now; Mako is half-tempted to do it for him.

Apologetic at the reminder that she’s still listening, Yancy sends Mako a tangled flash of explanation: all the things he’s stolen, intentionally or otherwise, from the younger brother who couldn’t quite keep up; still, still the conviction that Raleigh shouldn’t need Yancy as much as he does. Yancy doesn’t want to ruin what she has with Raleigh, not now when they are so happy and he is miraculously here to witness it.

[ _Perhaps you haven’t been paying attention,_ ] replies Mako, and giddy, she sends back all the memories and sense-impressions of her own: a long-locked door opening, the final piece that completes a circuit, waking up in the dead of night and having somewhere to turn. Her own insecurity, having seen the two of them close-looped as they once were, eased daily by wool-warm embraces that offer everything and demand nothing. Trigonometry. History looping back on itself, cause inextricable from effect, scars that were worth their price, the fearless kind of laughter that knows grief and chooses to be happy in spite of it. And a word, in as many languages as she knows it: [ _Both. I want you both._ ]

He’s laughing now; they both are, her boys. One in her head and one out loud, they say, “How can you possibly be real?”

“You’re a very lucky person,” she says matter-of-factly, and then she kisses him.

Shockwaves of disbelief from Raleigh. She sees now how carefully he’s avoided asking her for this, how much he wanted to; his rekindled relationship with Yancy did nothing to dampen his feelings for her. Raleigh Becket does not run out of love. To his slowly-growing and tentative hope, Mako replies with her own smug and proprietary affection, pressing his mouth open.

[ _Kiss her back, you idiot,_ ] she hears Yancy’s voice saying, and then: [ _do I have to do everything around here?_ ]

With that, there’s suddenly quite a bit more participation from the mouth under hers. Mako works her tongue into his mouth to feel Yancy suckle at it, and she can feel the moment when Raleigh wrestles control back to bite down on her bottom lip. His hands bury themselves in her hair and then, like the copilots they all are, they’re moving together.

“Yeah?” he asks when they pull apart, breathless. She raises one eyebrow at him, and he returns it.

“Are you with me, Mr. Becket?” she asks.

He smiles like the sun coming up. “Always.”

“Good.” Mako holds out her hand. “Because we have some catching up to do.”

**Author's Note:**

> Endless thanks to tentacledog/gold_bluepoint for the beautiful [art accompaniment](http://tentacledog.tumblr.com/post/77257976616/) and to zempasuchil for the beta and shrieks of encouragement! [ETA: And this [AMAZING SURPRISE FANMIX OMG](http://zempasuchil.tumblr.com/post/81555729025/)]. This fic started life as a [tumblr](http://callowyn.tumblr.com/post/64426278079) [conversation](http://callowyn.tumblr.com/post/64556815649) with these two lovelies and I couldn't ask for better cheerleaders. Thanks also to the Pacific Rim RBB mods, and as always to thegeminisage for all her help.
> 
> Also: everyone should feel free to write 1. the staggering amount of threesome-in-two-bodies sex that happens immediately after this fic, and 2. the sequel where Mako builds Yancy a robot body and coincidentally his dick is a vibrator.
> 
> HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY EVERYONE


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